I was signed in and had items in my cart when the Dog Fathers came up, so that all I had to do was grab the knives I wanted and checkout. The checkout (and I also paid by PayPal) worked flawlessly for me.

I'm certainly not disputing that Vic and some other people experienced problems. I'm also not saying that any of the dogs did anything incorrectly; I know that in a multi-thread, high load volume, web-based environment, it's a huge challenge to prevent concurrency issues and to ensure sessions don't get dropped. The Scrap Yard store load was much higher than normal for a short period last night, and something didn't work properly in all cases.

Vic's description closely mirrors what I did, and since I had no problems, I suspect that other factors were involved. I would guess that an internal Exception handling mechanism was invoked in Vic's case; maybe a shared server resource wasn't immediately available and the accessing method wasn't synchronized. So, all I'm saying is that being signed in might be part of the error condition or it might not -- only someone with a lot of knowledge about how the Scrap Yard store is written and access to the application and system error logs (assuming that the application logs errors), will have a prayer of finding and correcting exactly what happened.